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Minced Fowls on Toast

A savory mixture of minced chicken, cream, butter, and eggs served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Minced Fowls on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Remove all meat from the bones of the cold fowl and clean it from the skin. Keep covered until ready to use.

  2. Boil the bones and skin with ¾ cup of water until reduced by half. Strain the gravy and let it cool.

  3. Skim off the fat from the gravy and place it in a clean saucepan with ½ cup of cream, 3 tablespoons of butter, and 1 tablespoon of flour. Stir until it boils.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the finely minced fowl and chopped hard-boiled eggs. Season with salt and pepper. Heat the mixture over the fire until just ready to serve.

  2. Dish the mixture over hot toast and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cold roast or boiled fowl meat
Forms the bulk of the dish, providing the main texture and flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, giving it a smooth texture.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, helping to enrich the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the fat and liquid.
Hard-boiled eggs
Adds body and a soft, creamy texture to the minced mixture.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the hot fat and gravy. If the flour is not stirred in well, it can form lumps instead of thickening the sauce evenly. Stirring until the mixture boils lets the starch swell and thicken it smoothly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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